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Saturday, June 28, 2008

Credo 2: Add Another Zero

I lucked into going to the P.O. this week right after these stamps honoring Ray and Charles Eames came out (June 17, 2008), and I bought 5 sheets.

The Eameses were a wife-and-husband design team, famous for their chairs, among other things.They also made 100 short films.

Exploring ways to teach physics, they created the 8 minute The Power of Ten [click to watch on youTube], which I count among the influences of my life.

It is "about relative size and distance...and the effect of adding another zero."

Starting 1 meter above a man and a woman on a picnic blanket, the scene pulls back every 10 seconds, each time as if the camera moved 10 x farther away at a 10 x wider angle. Then it zooms 10 x closer in and narrower. So it journeys deep into the universe and back into subatomic molecule--and in each case reaches empty space.

I often think of these perspectives when I'm feeling overly crunched or spaced out.

My Movies

Quote of the Moment

“We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it’s really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.”